


The Day Death Rang My Doorbell (I was in the shower.)

by Siyah_Kedi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, found this on my computer, originally written in 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 13:17:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14497800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siyah_Kedi/pseuds/Siyah_Kedi
Summary: If anyone had come to me the night before all this went down and said, “Cass, tomorrow you’re either going to die or doom the world,” I would have laughed in their face.  Come on, though, you would have too.  Who really believes they’re going to die before they graduate high school?  At that time of my life, I was on top of the world.  A straight-A student, model daughter, and even holding down a part time job.  Nothing was going to take me down.  Or so I thought.





	The Day Death Rang My Doorbell (I was in the shower.)

If anyone had come to me the night before all this went down and said, “Cass, tomorrow you’re either going to die or doom the world,” I would have laughed in their face.  Come on, though, you would have too.  Who really believes they’re going to die before they graduate high school?  At that time of my life, I was on top of the world.  A straight-A student, model daughter, and even holding down a part time job.  Nothing was going to take me down.  Or so I thought.

On the weekends, my parents were usually out volunteering at the local animal shelter, and I took advantage of the quiet house to do my homework.  A pretty standard routine; get up, do homework, shower, do the shopping.  The rest of the day I’d either go out and help Mom and Dad with the animals, or else I’d go find my friends and hang out with them.  My alarm went off at six, just like usual, and I didn’t have any homework to do, so I got into the shower.  I hadn’t been in there a minute before the doorbell rang.  There was no way I was getting out of the shower just to answer it, especially not since I was home alone.  The way I saw it, if it was someone important, they’d leave a little “Sorry we missed you!” note on the door, and if it was anyone else, they could come back later and try again.  Or not.  I didn’t really care, especially since I’d just gotten shampoo in my eye.  I held my head under the spray of water and tried to avoid rubbing it; I heard that made things worse, but it stung and the water didn’t seem to be doing anything useful.  Soaking wet and half-blind, I pulled the curtain back halfway and groped around for my towel.  Wiping the soap away helped, although a quick look in the mirror told me my eye was red and I looked demonic.  The doorbell rang again, three times in succession.  I considered yelling at them to go away or hang on, but some subconscious instinct – probably driven into me with my pureed carrots by my overprotective, slightly-paranoid mother when I was still a baby – told me not to let them know anyone was home. 

And besides, there was no way I was answering the door with my eye still red and tender from the shampoo and the vigorous scrub of the towel.  I carefully stepped back into the tub and tilted my head back, letting the water pour over my head and rinse the remaining shampoo down the drain.  The doorbell rang several more times, sounding urgent, and I was beginning to get a little bit concerned.  I didn’t bother conditioning, just turned the water off and stepped out.  I wrapped my body towel around myself, and flipped my head down to make a towel-turban out of the slightly-damp smaller towel I used for my hair.  The first thing I did was check my phone. If something had happened, I was pretty sure that my parents would have called me, or maybe the cops, or _someone_ would have tried to get in touch.  There was a new message from my best friend Chel about the cookout her parents were having later that night, and nothing else.  I walked down the hall still wrapped in towels, and peered through the peephole in the door to find out who had been ringing the bell so violently.  They must have gotten tired of no response and left; there was no one there now. I debated whether or not to get back into the shower, and decided I could just get dressed instead. 

I finished drying off and found clothes, before starting in on my hair.  A really odd sensation crawled over my skin when I looked into the mirror.  It was like I didn’t recognize the person looking back at me from my own reflection.  The room tilted, and I grabbed the sink for support.  The feelings faded and the room went back to normal.  I shook my head to chase off the lingering feelings of strangeness, and plugged in the hair dryer.  A blue spark caught my eye from the outlet when the plug met the socket, but it faded quickly and I went about my routine, brushing and blowing my hair into something resembling a style. 

I considered what had happened with the weird feeling and the dizzy spell, and wondered if I shouldn’t go to the store after all, but a quick glance in the fridge told me we needed milk, among other things.  I was cautious about opening the door, though, and made a big show of locking it just in case anyone was casing us for a robbery.  I’d already gone through the rest of the house and locked all the doors – including the garage door, which hadn’t been locked in so long that the key got stuck in it – and the windows.  I locked the big garage door after hauling my bike out, too, although I couldn’t have said why.  The strange feeling had dispersed, but I was still on edge for some reason. 

I biked up to the Super Store on the main road and locked the bike up on the rack outside the door.  Chel and her mother were just coming out, and she reminded me again about the cookout.  We stopped and chatted for a few minutes, and before they left, she told me about a funny tee-shirt in the men’s section that I just had to go look at.  I promised her I’d find it, and we parted ways with a third reminder and my assurance that I would be there.  I had a list on my phone of everything we needed, but I decided that because I didn’t have anything else going on, I may as well wander around and check things out while I was there, and headed for the clothes section.  The shirt was as awesome as promised, and I impulsively decided to buy it, draping it over the side of the shopping cart while I continued to look around.  I found a cute notebook that I had to have, too, and pretty soon, the cart was half-full before I even made it to the food section. 

I had to pull my phone out to check my shopping list, and parked the cart off to one side so I wouldn’t block foot traffic while I was distracted.  It being the Super Store, someone bumped into me anyway.

“Oops,” said a familiar voice.  I felt cold all over.  “Cassandra, dear, what on earth are you doing here?”

No one called me by my full name, not even my parents.  I was Cass, or San, or very occasionally Cassie to my girlfriend, but never Cassandra.  The only person who’d ever called me Cassandra was my Grandmother Edith, and Gran Edie had passed away three years ago.  It had sounded like her, though, and I turned around, curious. 

Gran Edie was standing there just like I remembered her.  She was about five inches shorter than me, but her pure white hair hung past her hips.  She would sit on it whenever she sat down if it wasn’t pinned up or under a hat, and one of my favorite things to do as a child was brush it for her.  I felt my mouth drop open, and for a moment I couldn’t find anything to say.

“You’re late, dear,” she said gently.  She had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, and even though the skin around them was lined with age and drooped slightly where she’d had a stroke, they were as bright and clear as I remembered.  

“I-I’m sorry?  Are you – Gran?  How?”

“That’s not important,” Gran said, waving it off carelessly.  She fixed me with her stained-glass eyes and frowned. “You’re late.  What are you still doing here?”

I looked down at my phone.  “Shopping?”

“Cassandra,” Gran said sternly.  “You’re _late._ ”

“Late for what?”

“You should have been in heaven an hour ago,” she informed me.  “Milton was looking forward to seeing you again.”

I could feel my mouth working, but there were no words coming out.  I wasn’t even sure if I was breathing.  Milton was my dad’s older brother; he’d died in a car crash when I was three.  The only memory I had of him was vague picture of a large, laughing man.  He’d played football in college, and never lost the stocky build, although in a lot of the later pictures, you could tell he was on his way to getting fat.  I liked him enormously, because his voice was deep and rumbly. 

“Heaven,” I said finally.  Maybe I was hallucinating?  Maybe I’d actually passed out in the bathroom and hit my head, and now I was in a coma, dreaming that I’d continued my morning as usual?

“Yes, Cassandra, please do pay attention.  I don’t know why you didn’t make it, but I’m quite certain you were meant to be on the last flight in.  The poor stewardess was in tears because you weren’t there.”

I felt guilty for making some woman cry, and then slightly irritated because, _hello_ , I hadn’t even done anything wrong.  “I- I’m sorry,” I said, completely at sea with what was going on. 

“You think so,” Gran Edie said ominously, “But it’s nothing compared to how sorry you’ll be if you don’t make it in tonight.”

“What happens tonight?”

“ _Death._ ”  The sepulchral voice hissed in my ear and I jumped sideways to get away from it.  Some little kid was standing behind me with what looked like a plastic scythe, but he was wearing a Boston Red Sox cap on his head so I didn’t really find him threatening.  He laughed and ran the other way, disappearing around a display of American flags.  There was no sign of anyone who might have spoken into my ear, since the kid was too short, and I was becoming sure that I was hallucinating, especially when I turned around and Gran Edie was gone. 

I exhaled and ran a hand through my hair, which reminded me that I hadn’t conditioned it this morning.  _Well, that was freaking weird!_   What was I supposed to do, though, run off into the screaming ab-dabs right in the middle of the Super Store?  I looked around, but there was no sign of either Gran or the Red Sox Scythe kid, so I checked my phone against what was in the cart, and kept walking.  Nothing else weird happened while I was there, although I was pretty sure the pickles were looking at me funny when I walked by them. 

That’s a joke; the pickles weren’t looking at me.  The guy behind me in the cashier’s line was, though.  I could feel his eyes on the back of my head and turned around to ask him what his deal was. 

“You’re late,” he said, before the words came out.  After he spoke, I think I forgot how to speak for a second. 

“Excuse me?” I said finally, but he was gone; instead, the harried looking mother with two noisily arguing children blinked at me in confusion.

“What’s that?” she asked me.  I shook my head and started unloading my cart onto the conveyor belt.  The cashier was someone I knew, and we chatted for a few minutes while he rang me up. 

“Don’t be late tonight,” he said in parting.  I was beginning to get really annoyed with all this talk of being late.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.  He looked at me like I’d grown two heads.

“Chel’s cookout?  She was just here earlier, she said you were invited as well.”

Mollified, I tried to reassure him with a smile. “Oh yeah, sure.  I’ll see you there?”

“Yeah.  Hey, Cass, are you alright?  You look kinda pale.”

I felt kinda pale.  “It’s been a really weird morning,” I said, and loaded my bags up into the cart.  Outside, I unlocked my bike and propped it up while I shifted the bags into the basket strapped to the back.  It took a little bit of maneuvering, but eventually I got it all to fit, with four of the lighter bags hanging off either side of the handle bars.  As I started pedaling for home, someone behind me started yelling. 

“Hey!  Hey, you!  You missed your flight!”

I didn’t even bother looking back to see who they were talking to. I’d definitely had enough strangeness for one day.


End file.
